Notes on Sylvia Townsend Warner


I began writing this while attending Readercon 32, an annual convention I've been attending for a while. (I hope to do an Archive Dive post about that soon.) Saturday morning, I went to a phenomenal panel discussion of Sylvia Townsend Warner as a fantasist. This was, in fact, a panel I proposed myself, though I did not notice it on the list when I signed up for panels, or I would have volunteered, so I was tremendously pleased to see it on the schedule — I had feared the topic was seen as too niche. I'm actually glad I missed the sign-up, because the panelists were all knowledgeable, thoughtful, and a joy to listen to. I really would have had nothing to add.

I will share a few of the insights from the panel discussion, but first want to provide a quick overview of why I think Warner is important and then some updates about the availability of Warner's books in the US and UK (with the demise of The Book Depository, I'm less certain of availability for other countries).

Why Sylvia Townsend Warner Matters

The notes on the panel will present some other people's ideas about why Sylvia Townsend Warner is a writer who deserves more attention, but I want to offer my own experience here — basically, what I would have said had I been on the panel.

I came to Warner late. Not until I was in grad school did I pay attention to her. I had heard of Lolly Willowes and Kingdoms of Elfin, but had not read either (mostly, I'm ashamed to admit, because of their titles. I assumed they would be cutesy or twee. O how wrong I was!). My PhD advisor had written about Warner in her own dissertation and book, and she encouraged me to read, in particular, Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, and Summer Will Show. I did and fell in love. Here is a writer capable of astounding at every level: the sentence, the paragraph, the page, the concept, the images, the characters. Her prose is clear, sharp, usually light, often surprising. She has a wonderful sense of irony (which grew only more acerbic with age) and a brave eye for cruelty, but her sympathies are always, as she said, "with the hunted". Her ethical and political commitments were strong, but so were her aesthetic commitments.  

After reading the novels my advisor recommended, I sought out everything else, and that eventually led to the short stories, where I discovered that Warner was one of the all-time most prolific contributors of short fiction to The New Yorker — about 150 stories from 1936 to "Flora" in 1977, shortly before her death. A lot of the credit for keeping her at The New Yorker must go to her erstwhile advocate William Maxwell, whose letters with Warner were published in an illuminating and delightful book, The Element of Lavishness. If Maxwell had not had as long a career at the magazine as he had, Warner likely would not have either. In a tribute to Maxwell, Daniel Menaker wrote:

he loved the elf stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner and insisted that one after another be published in The New Yorker. They were antic and -- to the mind of many of us -- limited creations, and they ceased their New Yorker materializations the minute Maxwell retired from the  magazine's staff in 1976. But he stuck by them until the end. In a letter in November 1999, responding to my teasing him about those pieces, he wrote, "Your inability                                 to get any pleasure in Sylvia's Elfin stories has driven me back to the book. I read the first story last night and was beside myself with pleasure."

Maxwell was right and Menaker wrong. Anybody who calls those stories "antic" has barely read them.

(Pause for a tangent: The New Yorker should publish an anthology of stories by women from its pages. The idea of "the New Yorker story" is a masculine idea, and that idea erases a tremendous and generally forgotten body of work by women in the magazine.)

As much as I like Warner's novels (even the duller ones), it is her short stories that I most cherish. She started out as a composer and musicologist, then became a poet, and these two vocations in many ways made her a perfect fit for short stories, which have more in common with music and poetry than with novels. In fact, once she gave up novels and focused primarily on stories (after 1954), the stories grow even more rewarding — some of her richest, most interesting work comes in the last 20 years of her life.

Warner matters to me because she is the full package, the real deal, the whole thing — a writer in various genres whose craft was precise and whose vision was unique.

I proposed a panel on her work to Readercon because I think it is worth considering Warner among those writers whose base is something akin to fantasy, even as they write primarily in realistic modes. I wasn't exactly sure where this idea might lead, or even if it could hold water, but I was pleased to see the panel run with it.

Available Books

In the US, Warner's best novels are available in lovely editions from the New York Review of Books Classics series. All of her novels are available in the UK from Penguin Classics, and American completists can order them and other UK editions with free shipping from Blackwells.

What's most exciting to me is that more of Warner's short story collections are now available both in the UK and US thanks to Faber and to Handheld Press. Handheld seems to have full US distribution, so Americans can find their editions wherever they normally get books. The Faber editions are a little bit more of a mixed bag when it comes to availability. The wonderful Winter in the Air is widely available both as a paperback and as an ebook. The other Faber editions right now seem to be out of stock everywhere except Amazon, but they are definitely worth seeking out. (A few of Warner's collections remain out of print, but I've found them easy to obtain on the used market for surprisingly low prices.)

There's also a more obscure collection, which I only recently learned about and ordered from Blackwell's: English Climate: Wartime Stories, published by Persphone Books in 2020. It arrived moments before I left for Readercon, so I haven't had a chance to read it over yet, but it collects quite a few stories that have been unavailable for a long time, and it's a nicely-produced edition.

For readers willing to delve into the world of used and rare books, I recommend seeking out the Selected Stories edited by Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell. It's a good overview of her fiction and an excellent place to start. (I do wish someone like NYRB were able to publish a new selection of her stories. The Pinney/Maxwell selection is solid and a fine introduction, but a fresh selection would be nice to have. Even a simple reprinting of the Pinney/Maxwell would be an improvement over the current situation, though, where much still remains out of print.) For a real treat, seek out With the Hunted, a selection of Warner's nonfiction. It's so rare that prices tend to be quite high, but keep your eyes out — I eventually found one for $25 and snapped it up. It's not an essential Warner book for the casual reader, nor an especially good introduction to her work, but it's full of little gems.

Notes on "The Fantasy Fiction of Sylvia Townsend Warner"

The panel was moderated by Robert Killheffer and the panelists were Gwynne Garfinkle, Greer Gilman, Sarah Smith, and Michael Swanwick. It was a strong mix of panelists because they each brought knowledge of the topic from a different point of view. Greer Gilman, for instance, wrote forewards to some of the Handheld Press editions of Warner's books; Michael Swanwick has long experience as an evangelist for Warner; other panelists were longtime readers.

If I remember correctly, I wrote all of what became the panel description except the last sentence:

Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, Lolly Willowes, was the story of a  witch, and her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin, collected linked fantasy  stories originally published in The New Yorker. Though most of her work in between was realist fiction, fantasy often found its way in, particularly with The Cat's Cradle-Book. Let's discuss the fantasy aspects of Sylvia Townsend Warner's fiction.

It is a longstanding, cherished tradition at Readercon to argue with panel descriptions, but I was pleased the panelists seemed to be delighted by this description. I was even more delighted that they jumped right in to the spirit of it. Greer Gilman began by recommending the story "A Spirit Rises" (originally in The New Yorker; reprinted in the collection of the same title) as a story in a "realistic" setting that has a mythic undercurrent — it feels, Gilman said, a rather like stories of the Erlking.

Sarah Smith praises Warner as a master of small emotions, a pointillist, not a writer of grand expressions. She also praised what she sees as Warner's sense of wonder, which recognizes that just because an event is not good does not mean that it is not miraculous.

Michael Swanwick spoke of trying to convince people, particular genre writers, that the Elfin stories are worthwhile and running up against lots of resistance. The rest of the panel was surprised by this, but he said, in fact, many esteemed fantasy writers do not find anything of value in those stories. (This kind of response is reflected in a roundtable discussion of the book that Strange Horizons published a few years ago, where after some thoughtful and insightful discussion the participants were asked if they liked the book and would recommend it to other people and they struggled.) As Greer Gilman said on the panel, there is a coldness to the fairies — they are, she said, 19th century courtiers, "particles with charm and strangeness", but cold, distant. Swanwick noted that while the elfin have exterior lives, they don't really have any inner life, which makes them seem quite odd to modern readers — for instance, they do not expect emotionally satisfying marriages. They are, she proposed a bit later on the panel, very much like cats, and Warner was a great lover of cats. The difference is that elfins have a human-like form, and so we expect more human-like behavior, feelings, and responses from them. But they make sense as cats.

From the other end of Warner's career, there was Lolly Willowes, which Rob Killheffer noted is "about finding feeling" and Sarah Smith said is about a kind of liberation, with Laura (Lolly) Willowes recognizing that her life has been constrained and finding a way out of it. While one of Warner's most overtly perhaps-supernatural stories, it's important to note that the reality is ambiguous: either, Smith said, she goes mad or she discovers the supernatural world ... and it's implied that these may, in fact, be the same thing.

Greer Gilman pointed out that it's not that Laura is forced to become a "madwoman" in the woods, but that she discovers she can if she wants, and this itself is liberating. She has opened up possibilities for herself. She has choice. Rob Killheffer said that she escapes progressively, trying things out, and that she doesn't even decide to join (what seems to be a) sabbath of witches, since it reminds her too much of the balls she went to when young. Greer Gilman replied that Laura isn't looking for company, she's looking for independence — a wood of one's own.

Gilman also talked about a less-discussed Warner novel, A True Heart (1929), which seems straightforward enough in its basic realism, but draws quietly from Ovid. Warner was so well read in such a variety of things (classical literature, fairy lore, folklore, ballads) that it becomes the substrate of her imagination. She's not drawing primarily on a social realist tradition of fiction.

Sarah Smith offered that we ought to speak of Leonora Carrington when speaking of Warner, and this seems right to me. Warner was never really a surrealist to the extent that Carrington was, but they have similar wellsprings, as well as a certain similarity in their puckishness. Sarah also proposed that one of the things Warner does is position herself as a simple purveyor of gossip, though there is nothing simple about it. (This in particular with regard to The Corner That Held Them, one of her greatest novels, but not one with anything one might think of as a plot.

Rob Killheffer brought up The Cat's Cradle Book, which is mentioned in the panel description. While the elfin may be like cats, and the Cat's Cradle stories offer no consolations for life, there is, Rob proposed, still a warmth that is missing from Kingdoms of Elfin. There is, indeed, the panelists felt, a distance to the elfin stories, a cruelty — but multiple panelists pointed out that this is not a cruelty on Warner's part, as she is not, herself, ever cold or unkind, but rather she is all too aware of the cruelties the world inflicts on us.

And then the panel had to end, though it could certainly have continued for another hour easily.

Appropriately, the next panel I attended was devoted to the work of Arthur Machen — Sylvia Townsend Warner's uncle (by marriage).


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